I want to thank everyone for their affirming comments and interesting discussions of my sermon of a couple of weeks ago, "The Bible Says: ‘We Need More Than the Bible.’" It was based on Jesus’ words as recorded in John 15:12-13: “I have much more to tell you, but now it would be too much for you to bear. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all the truth."At last week’s American Baptist Biennial there was an excellent conference on "Biblical Authority." I picked up a couple of worthwhile quotes from the participants. The first has to do with the primacy of Jesus over scripture. We believe in scripture because it points us to Jesus. We do not believe in Jesus because we believe in scripture. The second has to do with the importance of maintaining the tension between the Spirit and the written Word.The first was from David Bartlett:

...the first and fundamental claim is a claim about Jesus Christ [not the Bible]. He is the one Word whom we must trust and obey. Of course, we cannot talk about him without talking scripture because scripture, is where we find him... It is, as Luther said, “the manger where the Christ child is laid. Time and again we come to the manger because we find him there, but we worship the Child and not the manger.’"

The second was from Donald Bloesch:

If we have the Spirit alone we are in a morass of subjectivism. If we base our appeal on the Bible alone, apart from the work of the Spirit and the history of the people of God, we are in danger of reducing the message of faith to axioms of logic that can provide the basis for a rational system but are woefully inadequate for leading us into a personal relationship with the Living Christ.

There have been a whole slew of articles in the news media recently about the latest "scholarly" findings in the search for the "historical" Jesus. Prominently mentioned is the work of the "Jesus Seminar." These scholars declared that most (82% to be exact) of what the New Testament says Jesus said, Jesus did not in fact say. They present a Jesus stripped of any vestige of the supernatural or miraculous (Time magazine refers to such portrayals as "the incredible shrinking Jesus").These "latest" findings are hardly all that recent. Such portrayals of Jesus have been fairly common since the nineteenth century. These portrayals generally reveal more about the scholar and his or her presuppositions than they do about Jesus. I. Howard Marshall; a New Testament Professor at the University of Aberdeen Scotland, in his book, I Believe in the Historical Jesus, warns that the word, "historical," when attached to Jesus is often a loaded term. It is used in a specialized sense which may trap the unwary. It does not mean simply ‘Jesus as he really was’ but rather ‘Jesus as the ordinary man that he must have been.’”It is laughable to think that Jesus’ disciples, to whom he meant so much, would remember so few of his words or distort them as much as the "Jesus Seminar" represents. This is not to say that the gospel portrayals are 100% accurate in all the details of Jesus’ words or actions. Obviously they are not; they do not even completely agree among themselves about all the details. Too much should not be made of this. To again quote Marshall:

...the strength of the historical argument for Christianity is that of a piece of chain mail rather than that of a single chain. There are ever so many historical facts involved in the self-revelation of God in biblical history as a whole and in Jesus in particular, and the uncertainty of some of these does not cast doubt on the certainty of the others. To call one fact, or even several, about Jesus into question does not mean that other facts about him are also doubtful. The fact that a movie film may contain a number of badly-focused or poorly-lit frames does not mean that the film as a whole is faulty or that the general sequence of the story is necessarily unintelligible. The possibility that every important fact about Jesus could be convincingly denied is highly remote.